Lucifer Before Sunrise by Henry Williamson Read Free Book Online Page B

who remarked on the easy money that the war was bringing to many in the countryside. Throughout rural England hundreds of aerodromes were being made on what was called the Cost Plus Basis. This meant that the contractor was paid 110 per cent of his costs of labour and material. As labour was the biggest item of cost, the more labour employed, the bigger the profit to the contractor.
    (It was said in The Times ,after the war, that of the six hundred airfields in Britain made during the war each cost on an average £ 2 million.)
    Mrs. Valiant, tidy, methodical, hard-working at kitchen sink and wash tub, said she didn’t know what the country was coming to.
    “There’s Albert Coggin gettin’ nine pounds a week, and where’s my boy, James? He joined the Territorials one day just before the war, on the spur of the moment, and they’ve taken him away, and what will become of his wife and li’t’l children if anything happens to him? He ought to be warkin’ on the land now.” Mrs. Valiant’s son, James, was almost her chief reason for living.
    “Ah, our poor boys, what will happen to them before it’s all over? And all those German boys, where will they be? And who will be the better for it afterwards? Who wor th’ better for the las’ war? Oh, sir, if only some power above would stop it!”
    My young corn is stroked by the gentle south wind, there is a shine upon the fields. The pale green colour of the barley extends from hedge to hedge of the Bad Lands, spaced by emerald lines of sugar-beet growing thicker across the brown earth. This morning as I was returning to breakfast after walking round the farm I met Mrs. Valiant, her thin face alight, hastening by the brick draw-well hidden in the lilac bushes now coming into flower.
    “Oh, have you heard the news on the wireless, sir? They say it may be peace! Oh, I wish it was going to be!”
    She clasped her thin hands, and looked as though a word from me could confirm the hopes behind the shining eyes of her face, with its sensitive straight nose.
    “I haven’t heard the wireless this morning, Mrs. Valiant.”
    “Oh, there’s a man they call Hess—a German he is—who’s flown to England, and give himself up, they say for peace!”
    “What! Rudolf Hess?”
    It was incredible: but no, it was not incredible: it was clear and simple. I knew the springs of that impulse.
    “If only our boys could come home again,” Mrs. Valiant said later, as with brush and pan (she didn’t like the electric vacuum cleaner) shebusied herself in the parlour with its open brick hearth, long oak table, and rush mats on wax-polished square paving stones.
    A man dropping unarmed to his enemies, out of the sky on a spring morning: only history, only another generation, of united Europeans, would truly assess that gesture. I had to keep my thoughts to myself, lest one of the younger children hear me, and repeat my words, and cause trouble to themselves from the mob spirit in the local school.
    Two hours later, when she brought me a cup of tea where I was trying to write an article for a London evening newspaper, I heard Mrs. Valiant’s eager voice at the door saying, “Do you think the war will end soon, sir? Oh, I beg your pardon, you’re workin’.”
    “No, no, Mrs. Valiant. Please go on.”
    “If only I could see my boy James warkin’ in the fields once more! Why, he ought to be working for you, as his family lives in one of your cottages. ‘A pity Mr. Maddison hasn’t got a thousand acres’, Mr. Hubert said to me yesterday, after seeing your lovely meadows, all the weeds cut, and the hay waving in the wind on Denchman’s Meadow. He said the land had never looked so well since old Mr. Buck had it, before the last war—there, you see, someone appreciates what you are doing, sir.”
    Phillip’s book, Pen and Plow, had appeared in the past winter. Its critical success had not been followed by sales of more than the first printing of three thousand copies. All publishers were